One of the taboo subjects in C&V is asking 'how much did you pay', its kind of tacky to ask but its also understandable for other to want to know. A few years ago I officially quite flipping, I still bought, sold and collected but no longer pursued it, if something became available and I liked it I'd buy it. Back then I kept spreadsheets of all my dealings but stopped in Dec. of 2010.

For you guys that are struggling I can only say a few things. First, bikes can pay for bikes but you have to let them go. Second, there's always another bike.

This spring I decided to get back into flipping, not as hard core as in the past but I pursued it and started a new spreadsheet.

The numbers:

14 transactions

15 complete bikes
3 parts stash's
1 frame and fork

2 transactions with bicycle shops
1 transaction with a big time local flipper

The numbers don't initially add but because 2 of the transaction were 3 bike 'group buys' and 1 transaction with a shop was for the frame and fork and a parts stash

3 titanium bikes
NO Carbon bikes
2 mountain bikes (1 was Ti)
5 Campy Record bikes
2 Dura Ace bikes (1-8speed 1-10 speed)

7 of the 15 complete bikes were parted out.

1 bike was traded for another bike

1 bike cost over $1000
2 cost between $499 and $999
5 cost between $199 and $498

Worst deal: $10 lose. Raleigh Mk II SC mixte Shoota re-flipped to me for $175. It sold on eBay for $233 with shipping. I was really disappointed with this bike, I was hoping to sell it for $400 +/-

Best deal % profit: 900% profit. Paid $175 for a '72? Raleigh Professional w/ a big parts stash and sold everything for $1200. I still have a few stragler parts from this deal. Not my all time % profit bike....

Best deal $ profit: $2050 profit. Will not name the bike to protect the interests of the owner but I paid $2230 for the bike which came an extra set of wheels, 2 NOS chains, an NOS Ti cassette, Sidi shoes and 2 Ti railed saddles. Revenue on this transaction is $4405 and I still have the shoes and 2 saddles. Not my all time $ profit bike....

Total expenditures: $6574 including gas and parts
Revenue with shipping: $13,947
Actual shipping paid out: $729
Gross Profit: $6644
Projested eBay/Paypal fees: $1000 +/-
Net Profit: $5644 plus value of remaining bikes and parts...maybe another $2,000 or so a net profit of $7644 once everything is sold

Most of my items are sold with free shipping which explains the 'revenue with shipping' and 'actual shipping' entries. These stats don't include everything I sold, there was period in from May though June when I was selling so many items that I got lazy and didn't enter every part sold. eBay and Paypal fees haven't bee deducted but figure $1000 or so.

I still have a boat load of parts to sell from the transactions/parted out bikes and the following bikes:

Basso Gap F&F
Paramount PDG 70 Mtb complete bike
Terry Symmetry complete bike
AD Vent Noir complete bike
LeMond Maillot Juane F&F (pre-Trek)

I changed my philosophy this time around. One of my old rules was a minimum $100 profit per bike, this time around I adjusted to a minimum of $250 per bike, lower volume higher profit margin. This also increased my cost per bike, the last time around I could pay $50 for a bike and sell it for $150 to reach my goal. In Tampa its too difficult to find $50 bikes that can be sold for $300 but I can find $500 bikes that I can sell for $750. Going upscale also prices many of the flippers out of the market.

A few bike I only dusted off and did a quick tune-up on, maybe 15 minutes of work. Others were real headaches, it seemed like everything that could go bad was. Oh well, you win some and lose some.

Sellers remorse? Only 1 bike, it rode so nice and fit me like a glove.

Last but not least a quick props to 'shoota' for bringing a few bikes to my attention.

That's impressive.

IME (very limited compared to yours), parting out bikes leads to better profits by a pretty wide margin; it also affords the opportunity to skim a few choice bits.

What a fun hobby, no? And at the end of the day, everybody ends up with a good deal, and either $$ or a nice bike to ride. What's not to like?

Only line item left off was the time invested overall, locating, buying, presentation, selling. As one with free time measured in minutes here and there, that would be a reasonable thing to measure and account.

this year I officially quit flipping bikes as I was moving and did not actively hunt them down...but a few came my way, and also I had some leftovers from last year.

2 years ago my numbers were...

about 30 flips,
profit was around 5k total

I got most all my bikes that were abandoned,scrap and dump finds, I also get high end bikes from police auction.

the high end bikes cost between 100-160, but they are flawless and sell for over 200 and need no repairs.
people want deals at auctions, they are afraid to go too high, As I am a knowledgeble seller, I also know when to not persue if there is no profit or a risky resale.

Nice!! I commend you on your industriousness. No doubt you saved many of these bikes from the landfill.

How many hours went into this?

While I have sold a few bikes, I've never gone hunting for bikes to flip. Just ones for friends. The difficulty in finding those has convinced me it would be very hard to make money flipping bikes around here. Besides, I like to ride on the weekend, the best time to be out garage sailing.

Keep up the good work!

"One of the taboo subjects in C&V is asking 'how much did you pay', its kind of tacky to ask ..."

i don't think so. but i'm probably in the minority. it is poor form to criticize another for his financial decisions here, unless it's done with tact and care.

thanks for sharing...

I find your reports interesting Jim. Thank you for sharing some of the details. It makes sense to target upper end bikes.
Can you share a little about how and where you decide to sell whole bikes? I see you use Ebay quite a bit for parts obviously.

Thanks for sharing. It's interesting to hear about your experiences and get a realistic P&L. I, too, would be interested to know approximately how much time was invested. For me that's been the rub. I don't flip that many bikes, perhaps a half dozen a year. I usually look for bikes on the lower end of the spectrum (under $200) which I know I can fix up and make some profit. But these invariably are in poor condition and need a lot of work. I'm probably more meticulous and obsessive than I need to be, but I like the satisfaction of bringing a run-down bike back to life and finding a new home for it. That said, I grow weary of rust removal and polishing alloy parts, even on my keeper fleet, and my hands and arms ache the following day(s). I also tend to price my for sale bikes lower than I need to since I'd rather get a lot of interest and sell quickly than weed through the CL riff-raff who want to lowball, flag, flake, etc. (I've only ever had two people come out for a test ride and not buy the bike, and both times it was because of fit.) I may revisit my strategies and look toward the $500 bike I can sell for $750, but those are usually more modern bikes IME, and that's not were my experience lies.

Also, if you don't mind, how did you acquired most of the bikes you sold--i.e., via CL, garage sales, friends/neighbors, etc.?

I do well flipping, but when I factor in the time spent, it's still more cost effective to pick up freelance work in my profession.

Only one question, does your tax return reflect those numbers?

same here - i can't pick up freelance work, but when i figure in what i make hourly based on my job's salary, my time is worth too much to be spending it wrenching on bikes I don't enjoy.

I mean, I like wrenching and restoring, but not at the kinds of hours I need to put in to flip bikes regularly. However, flipping was a great way to improve my mechanic skills over the years and try out various groupsets and build concepts that I'm into at the time.

My response to that question would get me banned for sure.

You mean to tell me you can actually make money with vintage bikes?

Why , I thought it to be a fair question to a guy posting his income on a public forum.

Surprisingly enough most of my high profit bikes over the years have been sold as complete bikes versus parted out bikes. I've found that complete bikes need to have end consistent groups, no mish-mash groups.

How do I decide if a bike is going to be parted out? I look at the completeness of the group and the condition of the bike. Over the years I've found a bike can have 1, maybe 2 parts from a group that don't match and buyers really don't care. Mis-matched seat post? No problem. Mis-matched rear derailleur? No problem. Mis-matched RD and brake lever? Big problem. Buyers shy away from bikes that aren't consistent. My LeMond was going to be sold as a complete bike until I tore it down for rebuild, the front hub cones were bad and can't be sourced, no big deal, I'll swap out the hub. But the BB was bad and the Ergo levers are weak. So that's at least 3 points on this bike so I've decided to part it out.

Where do I sell? Almost exclusively on eBay. Tampa's mid to high end market is very, very weak. I have no choice but to sell on eBay. Looking over my eBay stats it looks like I had about 140 transactions over the 3 months with no negative feed back. I traded 1 bike locally, sold a few frame and forks here on the forum and a bunch of parts here as well. Its just easier for me to sell on eBay. While I'm on eBay I'll mention that I sell Internationally, I've sold to:

Canada
Mexico
Hawaii
Alaska
Puerto Rico
Japan
China
Taiwan
South Korea
Thailand
Malaysia
Russia
Poland
Ukraine
U.K.
France
Italy
Spain
Greece
Germany
Brazil
Uruguay
Portugal
...and a more I cant remember.

My eBay stats tell me about 15% of my sales come from overseas.

Worst country to deal with? Canada.
Best country to deal with? Any country but Canada.

Time. This is important and it's why I've moved up market. More expensive bikes require less rehab time and tend to better taken care of than lower end bikes. I avoid anything with rust, its a death sentence on time. Higher end parts sell much quicker as well. I avoid dents as well...death sentence #2 behind rust. I'd say I average 4 hours per bike.

Shortest trip to acquire a bike: 0 minutes. 'Shoota' picked it up for me and brought it to my house.
Longest trip to pick up a bike: 5 hours round trip but it was for a 3 bike deal so that works out to be 1:45 per bike.
Avg trip to pick up a bike: Maybe 1 hour round trip. Tampa is a geographic nightmare, its very spread out with a low population density.

I've changed this as well, the last time around I'd drive wherever to buy a bike, Jacksonville (6 hours round trip), South Florida (6-7hours round trip). No more. Unless its a multi bike deal I don't drive more than 1 hour each way. I have better things to do. If I'm out of town I'll check the local CL and drop into some of the older shops. I bought the Basso F&F along with a parts stash while in NY visiting family, the parts were stuffed into my suitcase and ultimately paid for the Basso. On our way home from the Antiques Road Show in Jacksonville we stopped at the B&B where we were married in St. Augustine and I picked up a parts stash there (in St. Augustine not the B&B)

Where do I get them? Sorry, but I need to protect my interests but lets just say its the same places all of you acquire them. At least half were CL bikes. Both of my 3 bike deals started as single bike deals. I noticed other bikes in the background of a pic sent to me and inquired.....it was a Merckx and Paramount in the background. Another 3 bike deal started as a Paramount on CL and I asked if there were others, I went home with a Paramount, 2 LeMonds and about a dozen wheels.

Total time: 75 hours over 3 months. Maybe 5 hours per complete bike for acquisition, repairs/tuning, marketing and delivery. So maybe 5 hours a week? that's probably about right because there were weeks when I did nothing. 5 hours a week? Do I spend 1 hour per day? No. My initial 75 hours is probably about right.

This is spare time, I didn't take off work or infringe upon household responsibilities. Luckily my wife is very understanding of my hobby, I make it a point to do is spend some of my profits on her and the house. She realizes I could be blowing my money on other hobbies that have no return or drinking it away at a bar or making it 'rain' on Dale Mabry.

Jim, Great article you wrote and educational for everybody. I buy, ride, collect and sell eventually(I keep a base core) Thank you, Mike gioscinelli

It is a fair question.

We all know that are expenses are way more than our profit. When I flipped, I thought I was making money...I was, sort of. Retired, time is meaningless, I needed some more tools, and another bike...

I used to joke that I made slightly more per hour than the average Chinese rice farmer. I did accumulate all the tools I need (mostly) and more bikes than I need. Some weeks I made more than Jim made a month (ave). I did it because I liked bikes and had time, not because it was profitable.

If you are going to flip, get large quantities of cable/housing/chains/saddles/tires, etc, or only deal in high dollar, distressed bike sales, but understand you may sit on it awhile. Used carbon & Alu has it's pitfalls. Like diamonds, steel is forever (mostly).

Unfortunately I cant pick up free lance work.....but this is in my spare time, time that's not allocated to anything else.

Fair question. Do the millions upon millions of Americans who sell items at a garage sale report that income? They probably bought the items new with their own money but I think you get the point. Is appreciation on collectibles even considered income? IDK.

But lets treat it as a business, subtract my hourly rate which is equal to my day job and my profit is almost zero.


This isn't what this thread is about so lets make this the last post concerning the topic.

Another thing not mentioned is availability as in you have to be able to jump on the good deals NOW and have a suitable chunk of cash set aside for the purpose.
The majority of my past flips came from craigslist.

...........I'm out.

I have a real job so my availability is poor to say the least.

Thanks for sharing, it's good to see someone else's thoughts and stats. I'm right there with you that I don't invest the time unless I'm pretty confident I can make some decent money, and $100 isn't enough. I'm done with investing 4-5 hours in a cheapo Schwinn to make 50-100, I'd rather be riding or spending time with my family. But if I can find a neglected pile of parts that I can partout, or a easy fluff and buff that's worth my time I'm all over it and I'll usually ride those until I'm ready to cash it in for the next one.

First off, a big thanks to MiamiJim, your candid accounting is much appreciated. I flip bikes on a very small scale myself, a handful a year (limited by the difficulty of finding bikes at the price/condition needed to turn a worthwhile profit, Colorado Springs is definitely a buyer's market). I suppose my problem is that I've not taken to selling things on the Bay...

My own problem is that here, the demand for bikes just isn't consistent enough - you can put something beautiful up for sale at a low price, but it can still take weeks or months for a buyer to materialize: variations in condition, price, quality, and ad writing don't seem to make much difference, unless you're obviously selling something valuable for much less than it's worth, sales are just random. Like Russd, I don't bother anymore unless I can make more than $100 on a flip - it seems like a waste of time, space, and effort to fix a bike, list it a few times, deal with a handful of flakes, then hold onto it for a month just to gain $50.

Thanks, miamijim, yours was a realistic and comprehensive presention of the facts.
It made for an informative read and satisfied curiosity about private resale/flipping.
You have the skill to repair a wide variety of bikes.
You are doing a good job, making some profit, and helping clients into the right bike/parts.
It is a lot of work.
Thanks for sharing.